Return to Haifa

Until the 26th of this month, you have time to go to the Heartbreak Hotel theatre, in the heart of Sants, to see Return to Haifa, the magnificent adaptation of the story of the same name by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, which Àlex Rigola has adapted and directed, with a cast of four actors and actresses who offer literally impressive performances: Chantal Aimée, Jordi Figueras, Ariadna Gil and Carles Roig. Return to Haifa, the original story, is a testimonial novel that recounts the reunion of a mother and father with their son twenty years after they had to abandon him, when he was just a baby, due to the Nakba, that is, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their country, leaving behind all their belongings and also, often, their loved ones. This happened in 1948, just as the State of Israel was founded. The protagonist couple returns there twenty years later (Kanafani wrote the story in 1969; you can read it in Catalan in the translation by Anna Gil Bardají, published by Club Editor) to find their city again, their streets, their home, apparently as they left them, but now in the hands of the occupiers. And to meet their son. The break, the wound, is impossible to repair or heal.Return to Haifa, the play, brings all this to the stage with undeniable austerity and authority. As soon as the spectator enters the small room of the Heartbreak Hotel, they are greeted by Rigola and the four performers, and the director briefly presents the performance: he calls it theatre of urgency, conceived to provide an artistic response to one of the great political and human crises of our time: the genocide of Gaza perpetrated by the government and army of Israel in the face of the passivity, or acquiescence, or complicity, of the international community. It is literary theatre, text-based theatre: the actors and actresses serve the text scrupulously, while dramatizing it with a depth free of any affectation, at the antipodes of any temptation towards emphasis. To say that the result is breathtaking at several moments is accurate. The length of the play is just under an hour, but it reaches far and deep.The infamy of Gaza, of the West Bank, continues its course while the wars in Iran, in Lebanon, in a Middle East set ablaze by Netanyahu and Trump, two war criminals who have led the planet into a black hole full of destruction and corpses, partly for their own profit, partly for the profit of the elites who support them, partly for the delirium of the exercise of absolute and unpunished power, also continue. A little further on is Putin in Ukraine and, below, bleeding as always, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo. Faced with all this, closing oneself in one afternoon to see Return to Haifa in a theater like the Heartbreak, where everything is in close-up and where the actors cannot and do not want to hide (but neither can the spectators), may seem like a simply symbolic response. But it is not so: it is an active response, it means affirming ourselves in humanity and civilization in the face of atrocity and barbarism. And it is excellent theater, among the best that can be seen now.